Her dad was a force to be reckoned with, and for a while in the 1980s it felt like every kid in America owned a yellow T-shirt with his name on it. The blonde in the photo is Brooke Hogan, the daughter of Terry Bollea, the man the world knew as Hulk Hogan. She grew up in the glow of Hulkamania and came of age on reality TV. Today, at 38, she is a wife and a mother of twins with a television career of her own.
Her father did not live to see most of it. Hulk Hogan died on July 24, 2025, at 71, after a heart attack at his home in Clearwater, Florida, and the medical examiner’s records cited by NBC News listed acute myocardial infarction as the cause. He left behind two grown children, Brooke and her younger brother Nick, whose lives have taken very different turns since the cameras first followed them around the family’s Florida home.
Growing Up Inside Hulkamania
Brooke was born on May 5, 1988, in Tampa, Florida, right at the peak of her father’s fame. Hogan had married Linda Claridge in 1983, and by then he was the face of the WWF and a movie star in his own right. Moviegoers first met him in 1982 as Thunderlips, the towering wrestler who tosses Sylvester Stallone around the ring in Rocky III, and Saturday morning kids soon had him in cartoon form too. Nick arrived on July 27, 1990, and turned 36 this past summer.
Most of our readers remember the kids from what came next. In 2005 VH1 premiered Hogan Knows Best, a reality show that let viewers into the family’s waterfront house as Hulk played protective dad to a teenage daughter chasing a pop career. It ran until 2007 and led to a spin-off, Brooke Knows Best, which followed her as she moved out on her own from 2008 to 2009. Brooke’s debut album, Undiscovered, came out in 2006, and its single “About Us” with Paul Wall climbed onto the Billboard Hot 100.
The show also caught the family as it began to change. Hulk and Linda divorced in 2009, and the years that followed brought the kind of strain that is hard on any family, let alone one that once lived on camera. Nick’s path in particular took a hard turn early.
What Is Nick Hogan Doing Today?
Nick was a teenager with a love of fast cars on Hogan Knows Best, and he raced in drifting events as a young man. In 2007, at 17, he was driving when a crash in Clearwater left his friend and passenger John Graziano with serious brain injuries. Nick pleaded no contest to reckless driving and served eight months in jail. He has rarely spoken about it, but on Good Morning America in 2010 he said, “I pray every day that I will be able to deal with it.”
As an adult he stayed close to his father, both at home and in business. “We were best friends,” Nick told TV Insider in August, on the first anniversary of his dad’s death. He married his longtime girlfriend, Tana Lea, in January 2025, and he told the outlet that Hulk stood beside him as his best man. “My wife and I are really enjoying being married,” he said.
Six months after that wedding, Nick was the one who stood in the ring for his father. He appeared at WWE’s ten-bell salute on Raw in late July 2025, and days later he was photographed fighting back tears at SummerSlam as “Real American” filled the stadium. He now runs the businesses he helped his father build, including Real American Beer, the Real American Freestyle wrestling league and a wrestling-themed restaurant called Hulk Hogan’s SLAM near Madison Square Garden. “I was involved since inception and the growth of all of these projects,” he told TV Insider. He has even hinted he might step into a ring himself one day.
Asked about his sister, Nick sounded proud. “I’m so proud of her and, you know, everybody’s doing really well,” he said. Brooke has said in interviews that their relationship has been strained since their father’s death. Her own break with her father came two years before he died.
Why Brooke Stepped Away From Her Father
Brooke and her father stopped speaking in 2023, the same year he married his third wife, Sky Daily. She never described a single blowup. Five days after he died, she wrote a long tribute on Instagram that Fox News and Global News both reported. “During the last two years, I had to step away to protect my heart,” she wrote. All she had wanted from him, she said, was “love, honesty, and a deep connection,” and she added that “our bond has never broken.” She was grateful, she wrote, that she “knew the real version of him.”
The hardest part for many fans was learning that Hulk never met his grandchildren. Brooke’s husband, the former NHL defenseman Steven Oleksy, told People in August 2025 that he had reached out to Hulk about a month and a half after the twins were born. “I sent text messages once again to kind of gauge where he was at, but there was no interest,” he said. He also wanted people to know how present his wife had been before the rift. “She was there for every surgery leading up to the last two years,” he said.
Brooke did not attend her father’s private funeral in Clearwater on August 5, 2025. Instead she took her husband and babies to the beach he loved, and her caption explained why, as both the Daily Beast and NBC reported. “My father hated the morbidity of funerals,” she wrote, adding that “the only thing missing today was him in his pop up lawn chair watching the waves.” You can read more about why Brooke chose that day at the shore. She had also removed herself from her father’s will in 2023, a choice she has since said she regrets. “It’s not about money,” she told Page Six.
Brooke Hogan’s Life Looks Very Different Now
The teenager whose dad once screened her dates on VH1 is now raising two children of her own. Brooke and Oleksy married quietly in Orlando in June 2022, and their fraternal twins, Oliver Andrew and Molly Gene, were born on January 15, 2025. They turn 2 in January. When she announced their arrival, Brooke wrote, “Our hearts have been made whole by the arrival of these two sweet souls we get to love.”
She also found a second career far from the wrestling ring. In 2018, she started a home staging company, and that work landed her on Season 7 of HGTV’s Rock the Block, which premiered in April 2026 with Brooke paired alongside contractor Scott McGillivray. She told Fox News Digital that her father never fully understood the business she had built, so the show felt “like a huge… medal for me.” Talking to People about filming in the months after his death, she said, “I think God works in mysterious ways because this has been really positive and healing for me.”
The grief has not gone anywhere. In that same Fox News Digital interview, she spoke as if to her father directly. “I am the daughter that wanted to save him,” she said, and later, “I’m so glad you’re out of pain.”
On the day of his funeral, while the wrestling world said goodbye in Clearwater, Brooke sat in the shallow water with Oliver and Molly on her lap and wrote him one more line. “We will be celebrating your life and all our good memories while we have our feet in the same saltwater you loved.”
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